The pile of letters and packages was just a little bigger than Monday and Tuesday. All of them were birthday cards and parcels for 5-year-old Danny Nickerson, who turns 6 Friday.

Post office supervisor Barbara Hynes made it clear this was a happily exhausting labor of love for her small staff, as they wheeled out racks of letters and bins loaded with boxes - all for Danny, who, like the rest of his family, seemed overwhelmed.

This all began when Danny's mom, 24-year-old Carley Nickerson, asked Danny what he wanted for his birthday. He is gravely ill, diagnosed last October with an inoperable brain tumor called DIPG - diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma - for which there is no cure.

Danny told his mom he just wanted cards with his name on it, since he loves getting real mail.

So Carley submitted an article to the Attleboro Sun-Chronicle, which the editors decided to put on the front page; from there it went to Facebook and the rest of the web, bringing in the first batch of 2,000 letters to the post office. To put it in perspective, Wednesday’s bounty was in excess of 10,000.